Anne Nicolas has announced that the only release candidate and the final development build for Mageia 3 is now ready for testing: "We are now two weeks from the end of the trip (at least we hope we will have no delay). Mageia 3 release candidate is now available for the very final tests. We need your feedback more than ever. The Mageia team is working hard to fix the last annoying bugs - what we call release-critical bugs. How do we qualify a release-critical one? All the bugs that cannot be fixed through updates, mainly in the installer, the kernel and some of the main drivers. As with the beta 4, live ISO images are still in progress and should be released in the coming days." Mageia 3 RC ships with the latest Linux kernel, version 3.8.8, and includes RPM 4.11, systemd 195, KDE 4.10.2, GNOME 3.6.3 and LibreOffice 4.0.2. See the brief release announcement and the detailed release notes for more information. Download the installation DVD image from here: Mageia-3-RC-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,865MB, MD5). The final release of Mageia 3 is scheduled for 3 May 2013.

Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux formed in September 2010 by former employees and contributors to the popular French Linux distribution. Unlike Mandriva, which is a commercial entity, the Mageia project is a community project and a non-profit organisation whose goal is to develop a free Linux-based operating system.

Anne Nicolas has announced the availability of the third beta of the upcoming stable release of Mageia 5: "The release date was a close call between Friday the 13th and Valentine's day... but finally, Mageia 5 beta 3 is available for tests. The road was long and strewn with pitfalls, but the Mageia community is just great and the ISO images are finally available. After a looooong meeting dedicated to reviewing all release critical bugs, a lot of fixes were released that allowed us to finalize the beta 3. EFI is now supported properly on all 64-bits ISO images, but we still need your feedbacks on this. This is now the home stretch. We do need your help more than ever. Please report any problems that you experience in the forums, mailing lists or, preferably, in Bugzilla." See the brief release announcement and read the detailed release notes for more information. Download: Mageia-5-beta3-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,740MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-beta3-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,555MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-beta3-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,713MB, MD5, torrent, pkglist).

Claire Revillet has announced the availability of the delayed second beta build of Mageia 5, with further delays leading to the final release: "After several delays the beta 2 of Mageia 5 is finally out. But it seems that, yet again, we need to postpone the Mageia 5 release. Due to various difficulties with EFI boot, GRUB 2 and a few other things, we need a little more time. Only a few members of our QA team have EFI-based machines, so if you do have such equipment please test beta 2 and report your experience. Our QA, packagers and ISO teams are working around the clock to bring us all a stable and secure release, but they still need to work out a few kinks. Therefore, we are planning one more beta release before the release candidate." Here is the brief release announcement, with technical details provided in the release notes. Download: Mageia-5-beta2-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,705MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-beta2-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,546MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-beta2-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,776MB, MD5, torrent, pkglist).

Rémi Verschelde has announced the availability of the delayed first beta release of Mageia 5: "It has been a long road, longer than we anticipated, but we're almost there. Mageia 5 Beta 1 is now validated! What took so long (a month and a half longer than originally planned)? The short explanation: some stuff went wrong and other things got broken. The long one: back in September, we decided to update our package manager, RPM, to its latest upstream version 4.12. This was done shortly before our planned mass rebuild, a necessary step before the beta where we rebuild all packages in the distribution to make sure that they are still compatible with the current state of our development stack. Usually, mass rebuilds show that a fair number of packages do not build any more." Continue to the release announcement for a detailed explanation and see the release notes for technical aspects. Download: Mageia-5-beta1-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,623MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-beta1-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,513MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-beta1-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,940MB, MD5, torrent, pkglist).

Anne Nicolas has announced the availability of the second alpha release of Mageia 5: "While many of us are having some well-deserved rest, the Mageia team is still on the deck and working on the Mageia 5 development. This second development release is a big step towards Mageia 5, since most of the core packages have now been updated to their latest stable versions: Linux kernel 3.15.6, X.Org 1.16 and Mesa 10.2.5 for some of the biggest ones. There has also been some important work done towards packaging KDE frameworks 5 (technological foundation for KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications 5) and LXQt for Mageia 5 - feel free to try them out, and don't hesitate to report bugs or discuss them on our dev mailing list." See the release announcement and release notes for further details. Download the live or installation DVD images from here: Mageia-5-alpha2-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,588MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-alpha2-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,453MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-alpha2-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,761MB, MD5, torrent).

Anne Nicolas has announced the availability of the initial alpha release of Mageia 5, the project's upcoming version due for a final release in the second half of December: "Here is the first step towards Mageia 5. Most of your favorite software has been updated to their latest versions. There is still a long road ahead, but all in all, this first alpha is in rather good shape. Base system: Linux kernel 3.15.2, systemd 208, Perl 5.20.0. Graphical environments: KDE 4.13.2, Qt 4.8.6, GNOME 3.13.3. Office applications: LibreOffice 4.2.4.2. Artwork and design: New artwork is not yet integrated in this early stage of Mageia 5." Read the release announcement and the very incomplete release notes for further information. Download the live or installation DVD images from Mageia's mirrors: Mageia-5-alpha1-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,557MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-alpha1-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,462MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-5-alpha1-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,695MB, MD5, torrent).

Rémi Verschelde has announced the release of Mageia 4.1, an unscheduled maintenance update that fixes a number of security issues and corrects an upstream syslinux bug: "While most of the world is turned towards Brazil to enjoy the World Cup, Mageia has been preparing its own major worldwide event: Mageia 4.1 has been released! If you were not expecting it, you might wonder what this unannounced 4.1 version is. It is a maintenance release for Mageia 4 which contains all security and bug-fix updates that were issued since the release in February 2014. In particular, the Mageia 4 ISO images were affected by an upstream syslinux bug which prevented installation using a burned DVD on some older hardware. Among the updated packages you will find the Linux kernel (version 3.12.21), various drivers for your hardware, and updated software." Here is the full release announcement. Download (mirrors): Mageia-4.1-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,534MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-4.1-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,458MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-4.1-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,614MB, MD5, torrent).

Mageia 4, the latest stable version of the popular distribution forked in 2010 from Mandriva Linux, has been released: "Right on time, and just in time for the first day of FOSDEM 2014, we have the great pleasure of announcing Mageia 4. We're still having a great time doing this together and we hope you enjoy this release as much as we've enjoyed making it. Major new features: updates to RPM 4.11 and urpmi, which has been given a thorough Mageia turnout and cleanup; Linux kernel 3.12 and systemd 208; GRUB is the default bootloader, GRUB 2 is available for testing; revamped package groupings for installation and rpmdrake; KDE 4.11, GNOME 3.10 and Xfce 4.10 desktops; LibreOffice 4.1.3; experimental UEFI support; FullHD+ resolution support." Read the release announcement and check out the detailed release notes to learn more. Download (mirrors): Mageia-4-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,526MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-4-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,448MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-4-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,710MB, MD5, torrent).

Anne Nicolas has announced the availability of the only release candidate for the upcoming Mageia 4: "Finally Mageia 4 RC release is out! After many nights working on the remaining nasty bugs, the CD and DVD images are now available on your favourite public mirrors. Thumbs up to the QA team for the patience and determination for a really long journey until this RC release. This was nearly the last run for the final release. This release candidate includes lots of bug fixes on packages, hardware support, installers (both the classical and the live one). Please take some time to test it as it’s the very last chance to fix release critical bugs." Here is the brief release announcement, with detailed technical information available in the release notes. Download links: Mageia-4-RC-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,507MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-4-RC-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,431MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-4-RC-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,721MB, MD5, torrent).

Anne Nicolas has announced the availability of the second beta release of Mageia 4: "Finally Mageia 4 beta 2 is available for testing. Lots of effort was put into fixing the remaining blocking bugs. This is not yet finished but we are proud of the current results. Lots of work was done on drakxtools and classical installer to switch from that good old GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3. The documentation and i18n teams have also improved a lot of online documents and translations to make it available in as many languages as possible. Your feedback is more essential than ever to finalize this fourth release of Mageia!" This release includes Linux kernel 3.12.3, systemd 208, X.Org Server 1.14.4, Mesa 10.0, KDE 4.11.3 and GNOME 3.10.1. See the release announcement and the technical release notes for further information. Download links: Mageia-4-beta2-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,518MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-4-beta2-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,458MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-4-beta2-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,742MB, MD5, torrent).

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